Dennis Shasha is a professor of computer science at the Courant Institute of New York University where he works with biologists on pattern discovery for network inference; with computational chemists on algorithms for protein design; with physicists and financial people on algorithms for time series; on database applications in untrusted environments; and on computational reproducibility.
Other areas of interest include database tuning as well as tree and graph matching.
He has written a few books, including a professional reference book Database Tuning: principles, experiments, and troubleshooting techniques (2002, Morgan Kaufmann), six books about a mathematical detective named Dr. Ecco entitled The Puzzling Adventures of Dr. Ecco (1988, Freeman, and republished in 1998 by Dover), Codes, Puzzles, and Conspiracy (1992, Freeman, republished in 2004 by Dover), Dr. Ecco's Cyberpuzzles (2002, W. W. Norton), Puzzling Adventures (2005, W. W. Norton), The Puzzler's Elusion (2006, Avalon Publishing), Puzzles for Programmer's and Pros (2007, Wrox/Wiley), a book of biographies about great computer scientists called Out of Their Minds: The Lives and discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists (with Cathy Lazere)(1995, Copernicus/Springer-Verlag), Pattern Discovery in Biomolecular Data: Tools, Techniques, and Applications published in 1999 by Oxford University Press, High Performance Discovery in Time Series: Techniques and Case Studies (with Yunyue Zhu) Springer Verlag Publishers, June 2004, Statistics is Easy (with Manda Wilson), Morgan Claypool publishing 2008, a book about the future of computing Natural Computing: DNA, Quantum bits, and the future of smart machines (with Cathy Lazere) W. W. Norton, May 2010, a book about DNA computing Stored Clocked Programs Inside DNA: A Simplifying Framework for Nanocomputing (with Jessica Chang) published by Morgan Claypool in 2011, and a book about finding causal networks in biology Network Inference in Molecular Biology - A hands-on Framework, Jesse Lingeman and Dennis Shasha, Springer Verlag, 2012.
He has co-authored over sixty journal papers, seventy conference papers, and fifteen patents. He has written the puzzle column for various publications including Scientific American.